This little Perl script will do the trick. PasswordGenerator generates passwords like you've seen on those AOL coasters, er, disks of the form:
I consider this superior to passwords consisting of to random strings of letters and digits. Users have a hard time remembering truly random passwords, and tend to change their passwords to something easily guessed (and insecure).
By starting with a password that is relatively easy to remember, users are more likely to stick with your suggestion. Because the password is relatively hard to guess, security is maintained.
A disclaimer: I have been using Perl for only a few weeks at the point were I wrote this. If there is a better way of doing this in Perl, I would be delighted to hear from you!
The word list (in the ZIP file) was snarfed from Project Gutenberg, and subsetted to words of 4 to 6 characters containing only lowercase letters. With over 25,000 words in the list, the PasswordGenerator will yield over 6 billion unique passwords. Note that I have not edited the list of words, so there may be words in the list you would not want to use in passwords.
| $Date: 2002-12-22 23:39:08 $ | home |